COVID-19: Against a Lockdown Approach
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COVID-19: Against a Lockdown Approach Steven R. Kraaijeveld 1 Received: 7 September 2020 / Revised: 24 October 2020 / Accepted: 27 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Governments around the world have faced the challenge of how to respond to the recent outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Some have reacted by greatly restricting the freedom of citizens, while others have opted for less drastic policies. In this paper, I draw a parallel with vaccination ethics to conceptualize two distinct approaches to COVID-19 that I call altruistic and lockdown. Given that the individual measures necessary to limit the spread of the virus can in principle be achieved voluntarily as well as through enforcement, the question arises of how much freedom governments ought to give citizens to adopt the required measures. I argue that an altruistic approach is preferable on moral grounds: it preserves important citizen freedoms, avoids a number of potential injustices, and gives people a much-needed sense of meaning in precarious times. Keywords COVID-19 . Lockdown . Altruism . Freedom . Justice . Public health ethics
“The world can understand well enough the process of perishing for want of food: perhaps few persons can enter into or follow out that of going mad from solitary confinement.” Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 323
Introduction The recent outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was classified as a pandemic * Steven R. Kraaijeveld [email protected]
1
Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, Netherlands
Asian Bioethics Review
by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020. Given the unavailability of either a vaccine or a cure in the aftermath of the outbreak, governments around the world have faced the challenge of how best to respond so as to curb the spread of the virus. Since little is currently known about COVID-19, no single course of action has been unequivocally recommended by epidemiologists, virologists, and other experts. The Chinese government responded to the outbreak in the city of Wuhan, where the virus first appeared in December 2019, by practically shutting down life in the city. The implementation of a lockdown of this kind, which has subsequently been followed by other nations—most notably Italy, which witnessed the first major outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Europe—has been the subject of much discussion in the media and elsewhere. The focus, however, has been more on whether or not a lockdown is (likely to be) effective, than on the ethical issues that such a severe and far-reaching response raises. In this paper, I want to examine the morality of a lockdown response to COVID-19. In order to do so, I draw a parallel to recent work on vaccination ethics, where the goal of protecting vulnerable third parties through vaccination has been argued to be achievable, at least in principle, either by leaving people free to vaccinate for the sake of others or by takin
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